"I don't allow ads" because ads are malware for the human brain. An ad is explicitly designed to hack our minds/emotions, and I, for one, won't go there (as far as I am able).
Exactly. Snow Crash explores the idea of a "mind virus", which seemed a little silly when I originally read the book. But nowadays, it's clear that most ad campaigns are exactly that: hacks of the brain.
Just think about the ad strategies of, say, Coca-cola and Pepsi. They don't tell you about a new product. They don't inform you about any benefits of their product, or advantages relative to the competition. They purely exist to keep the brand names in your head, and associate the brand names with images of people having fun. And the saddest part is, it works! We desperately need regulation to prevent companies from hacking consumer's brains into zombies who grab products on the shelf based on how many times they've heard the name spewed out of their television in the last 24 hours.
On the flip side, I would be happy to allow purely informative, contextual, non-tracking ads in my browser. Objective statements about new products I'm actually interested in? Sure! Privacy invading, mind manipulating mental malware? No thanks.
Recently, this has been reminding me of all the hand wringing about "prompt injection vulnerabilities" - like e.g. when you have an LLM summarizing articles for you, or going over your inbox, and a malicious actor sneaks in a well-crafted bit of text that makes that LLM return you false information, or forward all your e-mails to attacker's address, etc.
Well guess what, ads are exactly such prompt injection attacks, but on humans.
Exactly. They are designed to do exactly that. I remember ads for companies that no longer exist. I remember ad campaigns that the companies abandoned decades ago. That was designed to be in my brain. To be the 'first choice' on products when equivalents exist. Some of this stuff was so effective it literally changed the way people buy things and why they buy them (mmmm bacon).
